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Famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84) will come out with a new book in December: a slender, 96-page work called The Strange Library. The book was originally published in Japanese back in 2008, but the English-language version will feature original, specially designed text and illustrations. The book tells the story of a young boy taken hostage in a library by an old man, who forces him to memorize a number of books with the intention of eating his brain to absorb the information. The boy then plots his escape with the help of a girl and a doughnut-making man dressed as a sheep. In a press release, Knopf chairman and EIC Sonny Mehta called the book "as scary and surprising as anything he has ever written."